Sixty years later, the city's schools remain an enduring symbol.

Dick Gregory, who recently died at the age of 84, was a pioneering African-American satirist. Like many black entertainers in the 1960s, he used his celebrity to aid the cause of civil rights by drawing attention to the absurdities of segregation and racial discrimination. In 1964 Gregory was thrown into the Jefferson County Jail in Pine Bluff for trying to eat in the whites-only section of a truck stop cafe.